Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have long been used to understand the semantic relationship between the text and image. However, there are problems with mode collapsing in the image generation that causes some preferred output modes. Our aim is to improve the training of the network by using a specialized mode-seeking loss function to avoid this issue. In the text to image synthesis, our loss function differentiates two points in latent space for the generation of distinct images. We validate our model on the Caltech Birds (CUB) dataset and the Microsoft COCO dataset by changing the intensity of the loss function during the training. Experimental results demonstrate that our model works very well compared to some state-of-the-art approaches.
Peking University（北京大学）；University of California, Merced（加州大学默塞德分校）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；Google Cloud（谷歌云）
Most conditional generation tasks expect diverse outputs given a single conditional context. However, conditional generative adversarial networks (cGANs) often focus on the prior conditional information and ignore the input noise vectors, which contribute to the output variations. Recent attempts to resolve the mode collapse issue for cGANs are usually task-specific and computationally expensive. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective regularization term to address the mode collapse issue for cGANs. The proposed method explicitly maximizes the ratio of the distance between generated i…
Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；Université de Montréal（蒙特利尔大学）；Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms（蒙特利尔学习算法研究所）
Synthesizing realistic images from text descriptions on a dataset like Microsoft Common Objects in Context (MS COCO), where each image can contain several objects, is a challenging task. Prior work has used text captions to generate images. However, captions might not be informative enough to capture the entire image and insufficient for the model to be able to understand which objects in the images correspond to which words in the captions. We show that adding a dialogue that further describes the scene leads to significant improvement in the inception score and in the quality of generated im…
Models trained in federated settings often suffer from degraded performances and fail at generalizing, especially when facing heterogeneous scenarios. In this work, we investigate such behavior through the lens of geometry of the loss and Hessian eigenspectrum, linking the model's lack of generalization capacity to the sharpness of the solution. Motivated by prior studies connecting the sharpness of the loss surface and the generalization gap, we show that i) training clients locally with Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM) or its adaptive version (ASAM) and ii) averaging stochastic weights (SW…
School of Artificial Intelligence, Xidian University（西安电子科技大学人工智能学院）；MoE Key Lab of Artificial Intelligence, AI Institute, Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学人工智能研究院）
We study the problem of extracting text instance contour information from images and use it to assist scene text detection. We propose a novel and effective framework for this and experimentally demonstrate that: (1) A CNN that can be effectively used to extract instance-level text contour from natural images. (2) The extracted contour information can be used for better scene text detection. We propose two ways for learning the contour task together with the scene text detection: (1) as an auxiliary task and (2) as multi-task cascade. Extensive experiments with different benchmark datasets dem…
We study the problem of recognizing structured text, i.e. text that follows certain formats, and propose to improve the recognition accuracy of structured text by specifying regular expressions (regexes) for biasing. A biased recognizer recognizes text that matches the specified regexes with significantly improved accuracy, at the cost of a generally small degradation on other text. The biasing is realized by modeling regexes as a Weighted Finite-State Transducer (WFST) and injecting it into the decoder via dynamic replacement. A single hyperparameter controls the biasing strength. The method …
Cinnamon AI Lab（肉桂人工智能实验室）；Deakin University（迪肯大学）
Convolutional Recurrent Neural Networks (CRNNs) excel at scene text recognition. Unfortunately, they are likely to suffer from vanishing/exploding gradient problems when processing long text images, which are commonly found in scanned documents. This poses a major challenge to goal of completely solving Optical Character Recognition (OCR) problem. Inspired by recently proposed memory-augmented neural networks (MANNs) for long-term sequential modeling, we present a new architecture dubbed Convolutional Multi-way Associative Memory (CMAM) to tackle the limitation of current CRNNs. By leveraging …
Facebook Inc.（脸书公司）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
A significant number of images shared on social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram contain text in various forms. It's increasingly becoming commonplace for bad actors to share misinformation, hate speech or other kinds of harmful content as text overlaid on images on such platforms. A scene-text understanding system should hence be able to handle text in various orientations that the adversary might use. Moreover, such a system can be incorporated into screen readers used to aid the visually impaired. In this work, we extend the scene-text extraction system at Facebook, Rosetta, t…
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB)（巴塞罗那自治大学）；Computer Vision Centre (CVC)（计算机视觉中心）；Eurecat - Catalunya Technology Center（Eurecat - 加泰罗尼亚技术中心）；University of Florence（佛罗伦萨大学）
Text Proposals have emerged as a class-dependent version of object proposals - efficient approaches to reduce the search space of possible text object locations in an image. Combined with strong word classifiers, text proposals currently yield top state of the art results in end-to-end scene text recognition. In this paper we propose an improvement over the original Text Proposals algorithm of Gomez and Karatzas (2016), combining it with Fully Convolutional Networks to improve the ranking of proposals. Results on the ICDAR RRC and the COCO-text datasets show superior performance over current s…
UT Austin（得克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Boston University（波士顿大学）
This paper investigates how linguistic knowledge mined from large text corpora can aid the generation of natural language descriptions of videos. Specifically, we integrate both a neural language model and distributional semantics trained on large text corpora into a recent LSTM-based architecture for video description. We evaluate our approach on a collection of Youtube videos as well as two large movie description datasets showing significant improvements in grammaticality while modestly improving descriptive quality.
Within the domain of texture classification, a lot of effort has been spent on local descriptors, leading to many powerful algorithms. However, preprocessing techniques have received much less attention despite their important potential for improving the overall classification performance. We address this question by proposing a novel, simple, yet very powerful biologically-inspired filtering (BF) which simulates the performance of human retina. In the proposed approach, given a texture image, after applying a DoG filter to detect the "edges", we first split the filtered image into two "maps" …
Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Rice University（莱斯大学）；Alibaba AI Labs（阿里巴巴人工智能实验室）
Textual-visual cross-modal retrieval has been a hot research topic in both computer vision and natural language processing communities. Learning appropriate representations for multi-modal data is crucial for the cross-modal retrieval performance. Unlike existing image-text retrieval approaches that embed image-text pairs as single feature vectors in a common representational space, we propose to incorporate generative processes into the cross-modal feature embedding, through which we are able to learn not only the global abstract features but also the local grounded features. Extensive experi…
Claremont Graduate University（克莱蒙特研究生大学）；Naval Air Warfare Center（海军空战中心）；Claremont McKenna College（克莱蒙特·麦肯纳学院）
We propose a method to improve image clustering using sparse text and the wisdom of the crowds. In particular, we present a method to fuse two different kinds of document features, image and text features, and use a common dictionary or "wisdom of the crowds" as the connection between the two different kinds of documents. With the proposed fusion matrix, we use topic modeling via non-negative matrix factorization to cluster documents.
University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；the University of Sydney（悉尼大学）
It is crucial to understand the robustness of text detection models with regard to extensive corruptions, since scene text detection techniques have many practical applications. For systematically exploring this problem, we propose two datasets from which to evaluate scene text detection models: ICDAR2015-C (IC15-C) and CTW1500-C (CTW-C). Our study extends the investigation of the performance and robustness of the proposed region proposal, regression and segmentation-based scene text detection frameworks. Furthermore, we perform a robustness analysis of six key components: pre-training data, b…
Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)（韩国科学技术院）；Chungnam National University Hospital（忠南大学医院）；Chungnam National University College of Medicine（忠南大学医学院）
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is a technology that converts spoken words into text, facilitating interaction between humans and machines. One of the most common applications of ASR is Speech-To-Text (STT) technology, which simplifies user workflows by transcribing spoken words into text. In the medical field, STT has the potential to significantly reduce the workload of clinicians who rely on typists to transcribe their voice recordings. However, developing an STT model for the medical domain is challenging due to the lack of sufficient speech and text datasets. To address this issue, we …
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；JD AI Research（京东人工智能研究院）
Localizing text instances in natural scenes is regarded as a fundamental challenge in computer vision. Nevertheless, owing to the extremely varied aspect ratios and scales of text instances in real scenes, most conventional text detectors suffer from the sub-text problem that only localizes the fragments of text instance (i.e., sub-texts). In this work, we quantitatively analyze the sub-text problem and present a simple yet effective design, COntrastive RElation (CORE) module, to mitigate that issue. CORE first leverages a vanilla relation block to model the relations among all text proposals …
